Voice Recognition – fact or fiction?

Voice Recognition – fact or fiction?

Not a year goes by without various customer requests for ‘word-recognition’ or ‘word-spotting’; so where is this technology today and can I have it on my Call Recording system?

The answer is ‘beware of the hype’; this technology is around but it’s expensive, inaccurate and will probably not deliver the results you imagine you may get. IVR systems have been trying to get Word Recognition working for the last couple of decades with only very mediocre success (as anyone who has attempted to use a system will verify). Consequentially, porting this technology onto a Call Recording platform will only transfer the problems to a new location.

However, recent advances in speech pattern recognition and modelling, coupled with the news that Microsoft are planning to integrate voice recognition into the next generation of MS Office, has renewed interest in the technology. Industry speculation suggests that new speech recognition software to analyse recorded calls, a concept that has been suggested for sometime now, may not be too far away. What customers will need to come to grips with is a high degree of ‘error-tolerance’ and this is always a difficult call. Watch this space for the latest offerings in Voice Recognition systems for call recording.